Social Media has a stronger impact to books than the movable type had, launched six centuries ago. Social Media makes information producible, accessible and spreads it easily, quickly and without barriers of entry. Is Social Media the paradigm shift which will the publishing industry alive? In any case changes will come. Big changes.
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The Publishing industry provides the creative with resources not available to them, namely: production of books, the distribution, the pricing, marketing and sales.
Book Production
Looking at the emerging landscape of online publishing all of the mentioned contribution is available to authors online and seems much more economic by nature than the capital-intense publishing industry - it seems digital content makes production a commodity. Making use of online collaboration and web 2.0 technology lots of crowd-sourced book sites like FastPencil allow authors to skip the traditional publishing route entirely (and control their own promotion) to self-publish their eBooks. FastPencil claims this allows authors to have access to the broadest distribution possible as well as the promise that the digital files will be able to adapt to any eReader that is introduced in the future. Another company called Blio is intending to offer publishers/authors the opportunity to create digital files at no cost that can preserve the format of previously tough-to-digitize tomes such as cookbooks. On top of that as a author you can:
- Embedded multimedia - inserts web pages, videos, and other interactive content into selected areas of text toenhance meaning.
- 3D book view which includes realistic page turning
- Reading out loud: TTS (text-to-speech) or a synchronized audio track
- Translate to or from English in an imbedded translation window
- This is all pretty impressive stuff and can create a user experience much more enhanced and engaging than paper books. Presumably this in the next years to come this will put some traditional offline publisher under pressure.
As part of the digital publishing revolution the way a story of a book is told even is about to change; transmedia is the buzzword here. Readers and writers engage and connect with each other to create the stories which are delivered then in systematically dispersed junks across multiple delivery channels. You can choose between chunks of text, watch a video story update or even, as in Girl Number 9, catch up on Twitter, where you can interact with characters and receive clues and updates. This means basically books are changing from being content sandwiched between two covers and organized by chapter to a many-to-many interactive storytelling. I like that.
Richard Buettner is a London based Internet Marketing company run by Richard Buettner. We are an independent outfit that started out in December 2009 and currently working on some great projects. We have 10+ years experience in Internet Marketing, ecommerce and Social Media (back then when it was called PR). RichardBuettner.com
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